You know how they say time flies? This week marks the ten year anniversary of Hidden Gears as a digital agency. Technically, I started the company in the winter of 2012 as a side hustle, while I worked full-time for others.

Hidden Gears was borne of the idea that "If it can be fixed, we fix it. If it can be built, we build it." I had learned how to program for Shopify's unique codebase back in 2009, when it was a small company, and CEO Tobi Lutke would answer my form posts about bugs I had found by saying, "On it, deploying a fix soon." I spent nights and weekends debugging the online stores of solopreneurs who were also juggling their part-time boutique businesses with their full-time commitments. (Shoutout to my very first client, The Municipal Prints Company, who were so nice that they regularly sent me appreciation gifts.) I learned a lot from being challenged to develop new, complex features for many different types of stores, and started building out my own best practices through trial and error. 

After a couple years of this, I realized that I might just be able to do Hidden Gears all-in, decided to quit my job, and started working exclusively for myself on October 5, 2014. My first new e-commerce client in the full-time chapter of the business was Bluffworks, who we still work with today (!) and with whom we have experienced a lot of the rollercoaster emotions of entrepreneurship together. Momentum grew and I found myself increasingly busy as the go-to for larger agencies who needed expert PPC or development help, or who didn't want to touch e-commerce at all. After a year, I managed to convince Akemi to help out as contractor for an SEO research project, and she was sufficiently enamored to join full time the following winter (thank goodness).

A full decade later you might be wondering, why do I still choose to do this? While where we're at as a company now is pretty different than the path I started on, my values have not changed. Personally, I know I thrive on a few things:

- not feeling stuck doing the "same" thing all the time
- working for folks who value and appreciate the difficulty and complexity of the work
- working for businesses where I believe in the product
- working with collaborators who truly care about the quality of their work

This is easy enough to do as one person, but supporting a team of 9+, it's not always a straight line path. Today, my north star is building an exceptional team, who can never be bored, because we're solving new challenges for great clients every day.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to our current crew + recent collaborators - Lita, Zach, Muhamed, Mat, West, Ruby, Nirav, May + Akemi. And a heartfelt thank you to you, dear reader and supporter of our little engine that could.